finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their
right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self-possession, to let
each of them teach some useful lesson to him.

Thus we, it is said, if we were not better instructed, might naturally
take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that
was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy
of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us
that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by
no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and
treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human
history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other
nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have
thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet
they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative,
provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and
indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic,
not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the
Madonna, were really representations of what men aimed at producing on
earth, not of what actually had any existence in heaven. And if we look
back at the greatest civilisations of antiquity, we shall find, it is
said, that what gave them vigour and intensity were purely human
interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action
on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.

It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of
which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was
frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology
had been taken from it. And there, it is said, we see the positive
worth of life; we see already realised what we are now growing to